This invention refers to a container or bin to hold bottles, of the type used in wine aging, a container with considerable capacity that, once the appropriate number of bottles has been placed in its interior, can be tilted 90.degree. so that the bottles can be positioned horizontally during aging.
The purpose of the invention is to achieve a metal container whose different component parts can be easily disassembled, but whose assembly and disassembly can be carried out extremely quickly and easily, without threaded fasteners or other auxiliary means which might significantly slow down these operations.
Bearing in mind the problem that the use of wooden bottle containers/racks implies, especially in wine cellars, due to the fact that the wood cannot be appropriately treated against certain natural enemies such as moths or borers, insects naturally destructive to wood, in due course metal bottle containers/racks came into use, where said bottles are kept for the period necessary for aging.
In this sense, the Spanish Utility Model with application number U9500808 should be mentioned, in which the container is constructed, as is customary, by means of a metal grid which makes up the base of the container and four other grids which make up its sides; these elements are provided with multiple holes which, as they are aligned with each other, allow them to be secured to each other by means of threaded fasteners and their corresponding nuts; the number of threaded fasteners used is, at a minimum, sixteen, which evidently implies that assembling and disassembling the container is an extremely laborious task. These actions must be carried out periodically, as at the end of each phase of aging the containers are disassembled for storage, so that they take up the least possible space, and must then be re-assembled when the bottling of a new harvest takes place.
The applicant company is at the same time the owner of the Spanish Utility Model with application number U9700777, in which a bottle container/rack module of the aforementioned type is described, whose characteristics focus on the means of securing a fifth metal grid which is independent of the container itself and acts as a holding lid for the bottles, as well as on the means of securing the typical side gate, specifically by using lock slide fasteners with springs, which considerably speeds up the handling of these elements.
However, the basic structure of the container, in other words, the securing of the different metal grids which make up the body of the former to each other, is still done by means of threaded fasteners passing through holes which are aligned with each other, with the aforementioned problem.
On the other hand, containers as we have known them up to now, apart from the means that may be used for their assembly/disassembly, have as a common denominator a fixed capacity, so that those containers that are intended for storage of bottles of the "Bordeaux" type are not suitable for storing bottles of the "Burgundy" type, and vice-versa, which forces the owners of wine cellars to have two different types of containers, which means added complexity, greater investment costs, the impossibility of using empty containers if they are not the right type, etc.